My husband Mark has been in and out of mental health treatment (outpatient services for the most part) for bi-polar disorder, a.k.a. manic-depression, since he was a teenager. For much of this time, he has received his psychiatric services from the same doctor who, for the most part, simply provided him with medication. These meds have changed a few times over the years, but for the most part he responds fairly well to the medication.

Recently, he noticed that his pill bottle described “schizophrenia” as the reason for the prescription. This was odd, because he’d never been told he was schizophrenic and what he experiences doesn’t seem like schizophrenia at all. But his doctor is now retired and he won’t be seeing the nurse practitioner who took her place (temporarily) for a while, so he brought up this “new diagnosis” to his therapist. His therapist accessed his records and, as best he can tell, the “schizophrenia diagnosis” is nothing more than a clerical error. But in refuting the diagnosis that Mark had seen on his pill bottle, the psychologist discovered something interesting.

Mark’s records included an official diagnosis from his long-time psychiatrist that Mark had never been told about. Apparently, Mark has an official diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, as well as bi-polar. This isn’t a surprise in the sense that we disagree with the diagnosis—we’ve long suspected that if Mark ever wanted to go through the same diagnostic process we went through with our children, then he’d be diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. This is a surprise because he’d received the diagnosis without that process and without ever being told that he’d gotten it.

In all fairness, the diagnosis doesn’t change anything. Mark’s primary diagnosis is still bi-polar disorder; that’s the one he needs ongoing treatment for. A secondary diagnosis didn’t change anything with his old psychiatrist, because she’d already been working with Mark’s quirkiness and knew how to handle it, which is why Mark always opted to be under her care when he needed help to manage his mood swings. A secondary diagnosis didn’t change anything with his therapist either, for the same reason. It may help the new people coming on board, but it doesn’t change which medication works with the least side effects nor does it change anything about Mark’s life.

The only thing it does is confirm what we already suspected. Mark is an Aspie. While I don’t quite fit the usual diagnostic criteria, we know that I am, at the very least, adjacent to the autism spectrum myself. Thus, when our genes combined, we created three autistic children. We already knew this!

That being said, it’d be kind of nice to know when one gets a new label slapped on oneself, don’t you think?